There are known and unknown catastrophic events from an unfolding climate crisis that we will be forced to endure that are already baked into the system by our burning of fossil fuel for energy.
If you remember the good old days when we were warned that exceeding 350 ppm of carbon in the atmosphere must be avoided at all costs would be deadly. We passed that threshold and then some in 2016 when we blew past the 350 limits and are now above 400ppm - permanently.
The Trump regime recently released their Fourth National Climate Assessment report (which he never read) that warned if we have any chance of saving ourselves we must decarbonize within 12 years to hold warming to 1.5 C. In the unlikely event that humanity does take the threat seriously then we may be able to soften the blow somewhat.
One of the hidden nuggets of truth in the report is how climate impacts will force our civilization into even more difficulties than we can imagine.
From the Fourth National Climate Assessment:
Climate change presents added risks to interconnected systems that are already exposed to a range of stressors such as aging and deteriorating infrastructure, land-use changes, and population growth. Extreme weather and climate-related impacts on one system can result in increased risks or failures in other critical systems, including water resources, food production and distribution, energy and transportation, public health, international trade, and national security. The full extent of climate change risks to interconnected systems, many of which span regional and national boundaries, is often greater than the sum of risks to individual sectors. Failure to anticipate interconnected impacts can lead to missed opportunities for effectively managing the risks of climate change and can also lead to management responses that increase risks to other sectors and regions. Joint planning with stakeholders across sectors, regions, and jurisdictions can help identify critical risks arising from interaction among systems ahead of time.
Annie Sneed of Scientific American writes an excellent piece on the IPCC titled The Next Climate Frontier: Predicting a Complex Domino Effect. Below is an excerpt.
The report emphasizes that scientists need to look not only at how global warming is changing natural systems but also how those changes will set off their own ripple effects through other areas—for example, how the increasing threat of drought harms agriculture, which in turn affects the economy and food availability. “Reality is complex. In a changing climate, nothing is being affected all by itself,” says Katharine Mach, a senior research scientist at Stanford University and one of the NCA authors. The complexity of these cascading effects means they can often be hard—or even impossible—to understand or predict in a meaningful way. But that is exactly what scientists are now trying to figure out how to do.
Researchers typically study systems in relative isolation, deliberately overlooking convoluted interactions for the sake of scientific clarity. For instance, they might study what roads a heavy rain will flood—but not how a storm’s damage to communications or emergency services might interact with those road blockages, creating more knock-on effects. “You might ask what’s going on with, say, this one forest or this one agricultural crop. You draw boundaries around your system, and you’re just looking inside the box of your study,” Mach says. That turns out to be a major weakness when scientists are trying to understand the potential risks and myriad impacts of climate change.
Here is a simple example: If researchers want to see how climate change will affect energy systems, they might simply model the effects of rising temperatures and heat waves on electricity demand. This could lead them to conclude that more power plants need to be built to keep up with higher energy demands for cooling. But a study with such a singular focus would overlook a critical pitfall: hotter temperatures also make drought conditions more likely in some areas, meaning there is less water to cool down power plants—and what water there is tends to be warmer, making it less effective for cooling. This complex interaction, which might typically be ignored, can significantly damage energy production. That is exactly what happened in Texas and the Southeast U.S. during recent droughts. Through such cases, “you realize that the problem you actually need to solve in the real world is more complex than the problem you thought you had,” says NCA co-author Anthony Janetos, director of the Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future at Boston University. “You could spend a lot of money fixing the wrong thing.”
This is why electing climate hawks to Congress and the presidency is critical. If we can avoid unnecessary problems through scientific research and infrastructure investment and planning it will provide us the clues for temporary adaption.